The most satisfying, intelligent and enthralling epic fantasy I’ve read in many a year.

An astonishing book . . . combines extraordinary scope with first class characterization, devastating and visceral battles, a multi-layered plot and a tightly-focused narrative . . . The City is easily the best fantasy novel I’ve read in the last decade.

One of the best fantasy novels I've read in a long time . . . utterly compelling fiction, an awesome example of the genre . . . brilliant.

Vast, immersive and accomplished.

A brutally visual world . . . vivid, motivated characters each with a heartbreaking history . . . thrilling and devastating . . . a true epic.

Gemmell's volcanic imagination . . . erupts into pyrotechnics of description and unstoppable lava flows of intrigue, sweeping us along to the white-hot conclusion.

A plethora of well-defined, superbly-executed characters . . . I found myself absolutely hooked . . . there is an ever-growing sense of tension. Even before the final, inevitable, showdown you get the feeling that things are going to get bloody and not everyone is going to make it out of this alive . . .this is engrossing stuff that's expertly executed.

Demands your complete and total attention . . . pulls together at the end in a gripping climax and wonderful multi dimensional characters . . . a new and very powerful voice in the world of fantasy.
Highly Recommended.

A sweeping novel of great power.

This is an astonishing book and all the more amazing given that it is Stella Gemmell’s debut. It combines extraordinary scope with first class characterization, devastating and visceral battles, a multi-layered plot and a tightly-focused narrative that keeps you reading, eager for the next page. The City is easily the best fantasy novel I’ve read in the last decade.

Haunting, distinctive voices. Mary's spare simple words paint brilliant pictures in the reader's mind. Leyshon's imaginative powers are considerable

Leyshon is a master of domestic suspense . . . Slender but compelling, the charm is to be found as much in its spare, evocative style as in the moving candour of its narrator

Masterful - crude, violent and poetic by turns... Its banter, outrage and razor wit sing off the page. A film, one suspects, isn't far off

It's brilliant and even more thrilling than its predecessor

A brilliantly funny, scary, sweeping novel with all the energy of Welsh's debut, but imbued with a wider sense of political and social engagement

I'm not sure that in 2012 there will be a single novel, never mind half a dozen, with more verve or nous or life in it than Skagboys. Ye kin pure tell they Booker gadgies'll no huv the baws but...

Trainspotting may be a masterpiece but Skagboys is the reason the artist painted it, and sometimes that's the most compelling story

A cracking read.

Skagboys is a compelling tale...a seriously entertaining piece of work

Skagboys, technically, is a prequel to the Leith author's brilliant 1993 debut...the result is a longer, deeper and more affecting work, one which explains and explores the circumstances under which Renton, Sick Boy, Tommy, Spud and Begbie - a roll call as familiar as Disney's Seven Dwarves for readers of a certain age - became the characters they did... It's an undeniably funny book, funny in that three-wit way of being at once visceral and true. Welsh's knack for dialogue - both ineternal and conversational - remains virtuosic and often exhilarating. It makes for characters you can't help but care about even the psychopaths and amoral chancers like Begbie and Sick Boy... Welsh's finest work to date

One of the most significant writers in Britain. He writes with style, imagination, wit and force.

The voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and grown eloquent.

It was never going to be light reading, but Welsh's vigour, wit and energy still make it compulsive

While you can place him in a literary tradition which flows from Alasdair Gray and James Kelman (and maybe Joyce before that), Welsh remains a lapsed punk, hung up on the Velvets and Iggy Pop

Like Trainspotting, Skagboys thrusts along with the exuberance of its episodic stories. Welsh hasn't lost his flair for comic set pieces

Welsh somehow manages to be both the Zola of Therese Raquin, and Dostoevsky's Underground Man, ranging between quasi-scientific perspective and a more immersed, troubling one. That he does so for the most part in a furious low Scots vernacular - filthy, or fulthy, and hugely funny at times - may seem remarkable

If you too loved the colloquial tangle of Trainspotting, you'll find a similar rhythm in Skagboys

Welsh revisits his old demons to give us the Trainspotting prequel...Expect more of the same raw wit and energy.

Engaging, heartfelt and brutal.

Quite simply a masterpiece…at least as assured and vibrant in its characterization as Trainspotting, Skagboys is even more on the money politically… this novel more than any other , (including its brilliant predecessor) stands as our spiritual and moral history.

There is enough of what Welsh does well — needle-sharp dialogue, vivid characters and a certainty of place — to make Skagboys his best work in many years…an essential read.

Welsh always spins his yarns with grisly élan.

I ended up charmed beyond measure, if that is the right word for a novel whose odd moments of poignance are regularly booted into touch by death, disillusionment and dereliction.

Every bit as impressive as Trainspotting

Visceral, tragic and comic, with Welsh’s schlock-shock appeal

If you enjoyed Trainspotting, you will adore this prequel... I think that Welsh has achieved the impossible and produced a prequel that betters the main text

Filthy, furious and very funny, this is Welsh back on blistering top form